This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 2000-60359, filed on Oct. 13, 2000, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a headphone accessory such as an outer casing, which covers a listener""s ears or contacts the side of a listener""s face around the ears, is comfortable to wear, is used in combination with a headphone system, and serves various functions suitable for being worn for a long time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to the development of multimedia using a personal computer (PC) and digital communication technology, there is a rapidly increasing demand for headphones or headsets, which enable personal non-noise-polluting when viewing movies, listening to music, delving into visual reality, playing games, chatting, or making telephone calls via the Internet. Considering performance, conventional two-channel stereo headphones have been improved upon, resulting in the creation of multi-channel headphones, which reproduce three-dimensional 5.1-channel stereophonic sound. Such multi-channel headphones are disclosed in Korean Patent Applications Nos. 10-2000-0009587 and 10-2000-0056191 by the present applicant.
In conventional two-channel stereo headphones, a speaker unit is mounted in a closed type enclosure which covers a listener""s ear, an outer casing surrounds the enclosure, and a cloth or sponge is used for listener comfort.
The multi-channel headphones disclosed in Korean Patent Application No. 10-2000-0009587 provide three-dimensional stereophonic sound by positioning two or more speaker units toward the front and back of each of a listener""s ears and mounting each of the speaker units in a separate open type enclosure so as to avoid sound interference and to enable realistic perception of sound direction and space. The multi-channel headphones disclosed in Korean Patent Application No. 10-2000-0056191, as shown in FIGS. 1A and 1B, use a sound field-forming member having a shape which surrounds a listener""s ears and supports enclosures in which speaker units are mounted, thus increasing sound effect. The sound field-forming member is covered with a soft outer casing which softly contacts the side of a listener""s face around the ears so that outside sound is blocked.
Recently, due to the emergence of the Internet and large capacity multimedia such as digital multi-functional discs, the use of headphones when audio and video chatting, playing on-line games, and viewing movies as well as listening to music using headphones have become popular activities, and thus headphones are used on a much greater scale than in the past.
An outer casing used in conventional headphones makes it comfortable to wear the headphones for a short time but the headphones get sweaty and smelly when worn for a long time, and thus become uncomfortable and unpleasant to wear. Moreover, this problem is more severe in the summer, and when used outdoors in the winter, conventional headphones are not good for keeping a listener""s ears warm, and thus it is not easy to use conventional headphones for a long time.
To solve the above problems, it is a first object of the present invention to provide a headphone accessory having a functional outer casing, which can be used comfortably for a long time in any environment.
It is a second object of the present invention to provide a headphone accessory having a fashionable outer casing having various colored characters and/or designs.
It is a third object of the present invention to provide a headphone accessory having a seasonal outer casing capable of keeping a listener""s ears warm or cool according to the season.
It is a third object of the present invention to provide a headphone accessory having a health promoting outer casing having an acupressure function, which stimulates pressure points around a listener""s ears.
Accordingly, to achieve the above objects, there is provided a headphone accessory. The headphone accessory includes a sound field-forming member having a cylindrical part, which supports speaker units for reproducing sound from electrical signals or supports enclosures in which the speaker units are mounted, surrounds a listener""s ears and forms a space in which sound output from the speaker units or enclosures is collected into the listener""s ears, and an outer casing formed of an elastic material, which can be separated from the circumference of the cylindrical part of the sound field-forming member and is directly in contact with the side of a listener""s head around the ears.
The present invention relates to a headphone accessory having various kinds of an outer casing such as a fashionable outer casing having various colored characters and/or designs, a seasonal outer casing capable of keeping a listener""s ears warm or cool according to the season, and a health promoting outer casing having an acupressure function which stimulates pressure points around a listener""s ears when worn.